The Construction of Jewish Ethnicity in the Late Soviet Media, 1981-1991

For a long time, in academic research, the idea of homogeneous coverage of the ethnic issue in Soviet periodicals, where the dominant frame of researchers was the “happy Soviet peoples.” That is why arguments in favor of an alternative approach to understanding the construction of ethnicity in the Soviet media have not been introduced. The proposed study is the first approach to analyzing the construction of Jewish ethnicity in Soviet periodicals. The work is based on the analysis of media frames - stable (repeating) patterns in the coverage of Jewish topics in the late Soviet press. The identified set of frames can play both an independent role in the development of ideas about how Jewish ethnicity was constructed by Soviet journalists over the course of 10 years, and can also become a serious basis for comparative analysis.